Transcript
This time I would like to talk to you about adjunctive therapies that we use at Monroe Hall Clinic, it’s one of those things that all holistic practices should have at hand and use various adjunctive therapies, and they tend to vary from clinic to clinic. Two of our main adjunctive therapies that we are well known for, I believe is… vitamin C, and the other one is ozone therapy.
I may actually want to start with ozone therapies. They are so diverse and treat various things. If we go back and talk about holistic dentistry, as I have alluded to previously, it is called holistic dentistry in England. It is called biological dentistry in the US. And I’m sure it’s called various things in different countries. Well, I think that integrative dental medicine is a much more appropriate terminology for it, but I’ll still stick to holistic dentistry just because in England that’s how we refer to it, really. But I will talk more about that.
So, while ozone therapies are rarely used as a standalone treatment to address different disorders and diseases of the mouth, it works as a brilliant methodology to support whatever that I am doing as a dentist. And this is just to say that this is how we do things, that this is how I empirically have learned to do things, is not all of it is based on science as such, but empirically through experience I know that I’ve had great success with treating anything from dry sockets to dead infected teeth, reversing early decay. Not really deep established decay, but early decay. Assisting, supporting my treatment when I’m dealing with a cavity and I’m about to fill and I just want to disinfect a tooth, for instance, as a supportive treatment modality, when I’m treating gum disease, anything inflammatory.
Having mentioned dry socket, by the way, do realize some people may not know quite what I’m referring to. Dry socket really happens after an extraction sometimes, and it can be quite unpredictable, whether the dentist would know always beforehand. Sometimes it does have a certain appearance after an extraction, which makes the dentist think that this might result in a dry socket, for instance. Not for instance, bleeding enough or barely bleeding is a not great indication. But either way, it results in a very, very painful situation, extremely strong pain, and it’s just not pleasant at all. And I have had patients in tears with this kind of pain, and it’s very difficult to treat with the mainstream conventional things. But generally speaking, it can be treated with antibiotics and so on.
But my approach to this is usually ozone, and nowadays also diode laser. But before I had the diode laser, access to my laser, I was treating it purely with ozone, actually, and just irrigating nicely with salt water and ozone. And I have had patients turning up with flowers because they’ve just been so relieved from the pain. So, it’s just a beautiful treatment modality, really, or supportive in this sense. I would then end up then prescribing sometimes antibiotics as well. And we know the antibiotics actually do take a minimum of 24 hours, if not 48 hours sometimes to take effect. And we would have pain relief within the next sometimes few hours in some patients. So there is something to be said about the effect of it.
Now going back to infections in general, infections can be acute, chronic, bacterial, viral, fungal, parasitic, or combination of all of what I’ve mentioned. So, now how can we deal with acute and chronic mixed craniofacial dental infections? And especially if I are resistant, what treatment regimens will effectively eliminate bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites? In the Western world, we may not be talking a lot about parasites, but certainly bacteria. And we know that we can’t really deal with viruses very effectively. With antibiotics as such, we all know that, or fungi. And the fungi are not too uncommon. I suspect it’s far more prevalent in the oral cavity than we conventionally would perhaps admit to.
But integrative and dental medicine really would consider antibiotics, antifungals, antivirals, antiseptics, maybe possibly essential oils, homeopathic, lasers, UV light, but also should really consider oxygen ozone therapies as an option. All of these regimens that I’ve mentioned have proven to be effective in the treatment of the infections. We know that. But most of them have significant side effects except for, you guessed it, oxygen ozone therapy. Now, why do I say oxygen ozone? Well, because we usually refer to it as ozone, but strictly speaking, a gas as such is going from oxygen to ozone and back and forth like this. So that’s how it is prevalent in the gas form.
Ozone, if we look at the molecule, ozone is O3, and oxygen is O2, as we know. And the ozone molecule is extremely unstable. So it really wants to go back to its oxygen mode. And therefore, it then releases one O. And so that’s what’s so amazing about it. And that’s how it’s can oxygenate and work as a very strong, very, very potent antimicrobial agent. Yes. And what is it actually? What does it do? It’s an oxidant, as the name suggests. And all of our bodily cells in the walls have got the antioxidant to not be damaged by the ozone. Whereas bacteria, viruses, and so on, they actually lack the antioxidant to fight this ozone molecule, this oxidant effect. And therefore, they just tend to collapse and be eliminated in that way.
For the curious mind, just to say a little bit more about ozone, it is, as I’ve mentioned, a chemical compound consisting of three oxygen atoms. The elemental form of oxygen occurring naturally is basically what it is as a result of ultraviolet energy or lightning causing a temporary recombination of oxygen atoms in two groups of three. Now oxygen is the only gas that can accept and carry an electrical charge. So again, for the curious mind, the biophysics of oxygen ozone in vivo, what it entails is upon exposure to living systems, the oxygen ozone gas instantly goes into a solution of the body via the plasmatic water or the interstitial fluids that we have, all have. And thus producing oxygen O2 and single oxygen atoms, which is the reactive oxygen.
And after a chain of cascade of reactions, the result in formation of two key reactive products that are significant here, and then it’s hydrogen peroxide and lipid oxidation products. And so as mentioned before, and we know through in vitro studies, that it is a powerful oxidizer killing bacteria. Fungi, viruses, and so on. In fact, it’s much low concentration than chlorine does for instance, and much faster, and thousands times more faster than chlorine does. And of course, without the side effects of chlorine.
An important aspect of all of this to consider really is that ozone has a negatively charged area. And biofilms, bacteria, viruses, fungi, infection, inflammation, all these things are positively charged, and this is a very significant factor, and thus how effective it is on a biochemical level, really. In short, it has a few effects, but the ozone peroxide that I’ve mentioned, for instance, has an amazing impact on red blood cells, for instance, through its oxygen release, making oxygen available to the red blood cells. The white blood cells, it has an immunomodulation effect, and it just results in a cellular redux regulation overall.
For those more interested in science and so on, and PubMed, you can find articles by [inaudible 00:13:26], for instance, that talks about up-regulation of biological information through cytokine induction, for instance, where ozone induces, cytokines and interferons and so on, and the growth factors, some growth factors. I don’t want to bore you too much with biochemistry and so on. Just to summarize, I basically use ozone as an adjunct supportive therapy in many aspects.
And in the example of dry socket, I could use it as a standalone therapy, and quite successfully so actually. I use it in gum disease. And now that, I may dedicate an episode to that alone because gum disease has gained quite a bit of attention, even in mainstream dentistry. So I use ozone as a supportive, as an adjunctive therapy in supporting my conventional gum disease treatments. And nowadays, also with laser, and treatment results have been absolutely fantastic in, as I mentioned, cavities, decay. Very effective. Infections, dead teeth, infected teeth, it has a very… Ozone is very effective by being selective on the anaerobic bacteria, which would then perhaps support white. So, effective in both gum disease as well as just acute infections, or chronic infections, inflammatory processes of teeth. Yeah. So, these are the many fields of dentistry that I use ozone.
My next favorite topic, or adjunctive therapy is delivering vitamin C. And we do so mainly through intravenous delivery system to our patients. But also, we use vitamin C as part of our detox program that in preparation for work, dental work, that’s going to be done. So at least a couple of weeks beforehand is when it starts. And it then carries onto the weeks after the procedures. And so I’m sure you may ask or have the question, why on earth would anybody use vitamin C in dentistry? Well, when it comes to vitamin C, let me start out by really referring to Dr. Thomas E. Levy, or Levy, who is an American cardiologist, who is a really strong advocate of vitamin C. He often talks about this sort of history of vitamin C and how we all… Well, most of us lack vitamin C. We don’t produce our own vitamin C, which is quite unusual. It’s probably one of the… I believe vitamin E as well, but vitamin C is one of the few vitamins that we actually don’t produce and we depend on external vitamin C intake.
And how has that come about, why is that? Most mammals do produce their own vitamin C. We, as humans do not, and as well as guinea pigs, they don’t either. And perhaps it’s not such a coincidence that guinea pigs are used in trials and so on. And so that’s come about through a genetic defect, really. And you would then think, well, haven’t we adapted with many things we do through generations? And speaking of genetics, one interesting book that I really always recommend, and many of my patients have actually already read it when I mention it, which is interesting, is called Dirty… It’s a book called Dirty Genes by Dr. Ben Lynch, also an American chap. Genes are very, very interesting in the sense that we can switch them on and off. And very, very few disorders are actually… We locked to, regardless of a lifestyle and environment. Most genes are dependent on environment and lifestyle.
So we can switch them on and off, and very much impact what happens to us, so using genes as an excuse is perhaps a bit dated at this point, now that we know so much about genetics and epigenetics. But either way, going back to this genetic defect, what it means, as I mentioned, we very much depend on external intake, and we really need quite a bit in our cells. And as you can imagine, if we lack absorption, then a lot less vitamin will go into our bloodstream. And then perhaps even less into the actual cells where we need them.
And also, just to give you a little more background about this genetic defect, in essence, vitamin C is the conversion of glucose to vitamin C in the liver. And that’s where it is not occurring in the body. But in effect, it resembles the glucose biomolecule, but it is obviously slightly different. Thus, it has access into our cells in a much easier way than any other antioxidants do.
Now, my question is something as basic as a cold, have you ever had a really bad cold and tried vitamin C or let’s say orange juice, [inaudible 00:20:53], or one cure that I have that seems to really work well is a little shot of lemon, freshly squeezed lemon into warm water and a bit of Manuka honey, and freshly squeezed, crushed garlic, and just take that as a shot. And that just seems to work extremely well as soon as I feel a cold coming. But the common one is just having lots of oranges, orange juice, and so on. And have you then felt that things have improved? That, to me is a sign of vitamin C actually being something that works really well.
And just to refer to Dr. Levy, the reason we don’t think of us not producing vitamin C and having to take it externally is probably the fact that we’re all in the same boat, really. So therefore, it is very normalized and not thought of as a defect or a problem, really. But it seems it is a problem. And when you take it in thousands of milligrams, even spread over the day, it has miraculous effects on a cold, for instance.
If we simplify things and look at it from a biochemical point of view, the vitamin C molecule is the generous one. It gives away to electrons. It just freely gives it away. And if we then look at toxins, all toxins are positively charged and they want the… They’re oxygen thieves, if you like. And if you have DNA, RNA, enzymes, and such, really vital, important things being deprived of their electrons, that can have very detrimental impact on the function of those substances, and thus the whole cell really. And here comes the vitamin C and freely gives back the electron. And that’s how it is so nicely effective. And not only does it give away one electron. It can give away two electron per molecule. So it’s twice as effective as most other antioxidants.
So, such high doses that we use intravenous vitamin C adjunctively or supportive to any treatment that we deliver, which may be an extraction, may be oral surgery, or it may be just drilling out amalgam fillings, whereby we might worry about too much mercury release while we are drilling it out, and so on. It just works brilliantly on anything that may cause oxidative stress. Yeah. That’s why it’s so wonderful in every way. And so our patients can have multiple procedures done in the same day and just come out of the treatment barely affected in a negative way, other than perhaps a bit of stiff back and so on. So, we have had nothing but praise about this as an adjunctive therapy.
Well, now there’s so much more to say about both ozone therapies and vitamin C infusions, or oral supplementation, especially liposomal vitamin C, but I’m afraid our time has come to an end. And I do hope that you’ve enjoyed this episode. And please do bear in mind that anything that I talk about or recommend is just broadly speaking, and every single case has to be assessed individually. So this is not a diagnosis or treatment proposal that I’m making in any of my episodes. Thank you very much.
You have been listening to the Mind, Body & Teeth podcast. If you’ve enjoyed what you have heard, please rate, review, and subscribe. If you would like a unique virtual consultation with Dr. Bita Fox herself, where you can find out how her unique biological approach impacts your whole body health, then please visit Monroe-HallClinic.co.UK, and request a free consultation. (music)
Last Updated: February 28, 2022
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